


Time Travelers Anonymous, or the One Where Sharon and Matthew Have Visitors

by harborshore



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin, Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21833425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harborshore/pseuds/harborshore
Summary: As it turns out, sometimes London becomes the vortex of an interdimensional fuck-up and you have some people who drop by accidentally. But at least they're interesting people.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 46
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Time Travelers Anonymous, or the One Where Sharon and Matthew Have Visitors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [teacup_of_doom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/teacup_of_doom/gifts).



i.

_Man out of Time_

Matthew only turned up once the building had burned down. Typical, really, Sharon thought as she turned to meet him, as the appearance of the Midnight Mayor caused that little shift in the world around her that she’d learned to recognise as his entrance music. 

“About time,” she said. 

Matthew looked at the the wreckage around her, the burnt-out husks of robots who’d been packing crates and moving goods, the walls that were all but disintegrated. Somehow (“somehow”) the fires hadn’t touched anything outside this warehouse. 

“Goodness,” he said mildly. 

“Yes,” Sharon said. “I’m not sure what caused it, but I was on a walk, and, well, the docks cried out to me, you know how it is.”

“Not really,” said the Midnight Mayor. “It’s quite different for me, you know.”

“I suppose,” Sharon said, then shook herself slightly. “Anyway, then he turned up,” she said, gesturing at the man who was sitting at the edge of the neo-industrial wasteland. “Walked out of the fire, cool as you please, not even a speck of ash on him. He asked me where he was and when I said London, he said, ‘Not the right one, surely,’ and then went to sit down over there.”

Matthew blinked and rubbed his eyes. “He’s not in the right place,” he said, and Sharon shrugged. 

“That’s what he said,” she repeated patiently. “Or that this was the wrong city, anyway, I just told you.”

“We heard,” Matthew said and that echo that sometimes rang through his voice was there in full force now, all of the electric blue angels out to play. “We see.”

He briskly walked up to the man and stuck his hand out. 

“Matthew Swift,” he said, and Sharon could feel the compulsion in his voice, the give-your-name-to-make-him-give-his ritual irresistible. Matthew was very very good at that sort of thing. Sharon less so, it not being the most Shamanic of specialties.

But the man raised an eyebrow and didn’t take his hand. 

“Charmed, I’m sure,” he said. 

Matthew tilted his head. Sharon hurried up to them, because if there was something she _was_ good at, it was to make sure nothing exploded when it didn’t have to. Diplomacy wasn’t an official duty of the Deputy Midnight Mayor, but it was sort of understood, like, that if she could defuse things then she definitely should.

“Sharon Li,” she said. “Hi, nice to meet you, that trick with the fire was quite something. Can you teach me that?”

“We can teach you that,” Matthew muttered, clearly still in a strop.

The man looked bemused, gaze flicking between them. “I’m Thomas Nightingale,” he said finally. “I hope not to be here long enough to have time to teach anyone anything, but I can go over the theory. Briefly, at any rate. So long as you promise not to attempt it without supervision.

And that is how Sharon Li got an advanced lesson in handling fire, Matthew Swift set up a dimension-travelling device by way of the London Eye, and Thomas Nightingale learned that there were versions of London that were so magic-saturated that he considered himself lucky not to have to police them.

ii.

_The Goblin Market_

“I swear I had to do this poem at school,” Sharon muttered as Matthew steered her around the fifth stall and only just avoided being knocked over by someone carrying a large crate of—were those rat skulls? Ew.

“Not rat skulls,” Matthew said absently, and Sharon sighed. 

“That doesn’t make it better,” she said, and knocked him hard on the arm. “Stop reading my mind.”

“Stop being loud,” Matthew said, and blinked, hitting himself on the head once. “Sorry. They’ve been agitated, lately.”

The angels. Great. Sharon was semi-comfortable with Matthew as the Midnight Mayor, even liked him most of the time, but the electric blue angels were another matter entirely. 

“Do you know why?” she asked carefully. 

“No,” Matthew said. “But they wanted to come here, so I thought I’d better bring you.”

“What is this, anyway? The goblin market for real?”

“Yeah,” Matthew said, and swung into one of his slightly sing-song lectures that she thought he’d gotten from his unmentionable once-mentor-turned-psycho teacher: “It’s supposed to span dimensions. Like, several versions of London. I thought, since we had that visitor, maybe the angels are onto something. I don’t like the thought of several Londons getting messed about, we have enough of our own mess here.”

“You can say that again,” Sharon said, looking around. There were lots of things she didn’t recognise, some she would 100% have called cultural appropriation if she wasn’t where she was and unsure who could claim the dream catcher motif first, anyway, and lots of people of mystic persuasion. Perhaps she should’ve brought a flyer or two about the group.

Blue light struck, blinding her, and when it cleared, there was a woman - a girl, really - on the ground, and the crowd was leaving swiftly.

“Hello trouble,” Matthew said softly.

The woman was on her feet within seconds, a spectacular bruise covering her face, brown curls disheveled and flying. She was holding a stick.

“What’s that stick for?” Sharon asked Matthew quietly.

He furrowed his brow. “Energy,” he said slowly, “we feel—“ he blinked, and began to walk closer.

“Hello,” Sharon said hurriedly, racing to be ahead of him. “Hi, miss, do you need help?”

“Where am I?” said the woman, holding the stick in front of her like, yes, like a weapon.

“We mean no harm!” Sharon said. “Just want to help, you know, the Midnight Mayor and his deputy, that’s me, by the way, the deputy.”

“Midnight Mayor?” said the girl. “I don’t recognise that title at all. Are you with the Ministry?”

“Ministry?” Matthew said. “What ministry?”

“What ministry? There’s…wait. Where am I?” the girl repeated. “It looks like London, and this is the Goblin Market, but it’s not—“

“Interdimensional bullshit again,” Matthew said under his breath. 

“Well,” Sharon said. “The good news is, we’ve done this before, we just have to go to the Eye to get you back home, but we should really figure out why this keeps happening.”

“Research,” Matthew said dourly. “We hate research.”

“I’m quite good at it,” said the girl. “Perhaps I can help, before you send me home.”

And while Hermione didn’t ultimately find the exact solution, she gave them some very instrumental clues. 

iii.

_A solution_

“An imbalance in the temporal—what?” Matthew muttered, poring over their notes. “That doesn’t even make any sense. Sharon, does that make any sense to you?”

“I don’t know anything about time yet,” Sharon said. “Or at least not about time being messed up, you know? I don’t know, what are shaman quals? I feel like I’m not there yet, I’m more, like A-levels, or something. Time seems like more of a uni thing. And we’re getting visitors from multiple universes,” She shrugged at Matthew, who scowled.

“Where’s Stephen Hawking when you need him, this is string theory, or, worse. I don’t know.” 

He pushed the notes aside and pulled his computer closer. They were in his Midnight Mayor office, but he’d told Kelly to “hold his calls”, which, Sharon didn’t know he’d learned even that much corporate jargon.

There was a weird noise, a kind of screechy hum, and Sharon poked Matthew. 

“What’s that noise?” she said, “Matthew, what’s that noise?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but it shouldn’t be in here—look!” 

The corner of his office shimmered and there it was.

“Is that a blue police box?” she said, hunkering down behind Matthew’s desk with him. He was rifling through his pockets, pulling out items, muttering, and she could feel his magic building. It always felt so strange when he did stuff around her, like discord in the hum of the city, in the way the universe was _supposed_ to work.

“Doesn’t this place have, like, Aldermen defences?” she said quietly. 

“Yes, it does,” he said, equally quietly. 

Eesh. Anything that got through Aldermen defences and all the way into the office of the Midnight Mayor, well, let’s just say it probably packed a punch.

The door to the police box was flung open, and two people all but fell out. One bloke in a trench coat and a tie, and one black woman in a leather jacket.

“Well hello!” cried the bloke, and tilted his head. “Why are you behind the desk?”

“Because you’re not supposed to be in here,” Sharon said. She’d found honesty was often the best policy. 

“Why are you here?” Matthew said, and the angels had definitely come out to play now.

Their visitor pulled something out and pointed it at Matthew who twitched but didn’t do anything, thankfully. Sharon couldn’t be sure, obviously, but she was pretty sure these guys weren’t dangerous.

“You’re more than one person,” he said, and Matthew shrugged.

“We are the blue electric angels,” he said. 

“Ah, well, I’m the Doctor,” said the visitor, not blinking. “This is the brilliant Martha Jones, she’s a doctor, but not the Doctor, if you know what I mean.”

“They probably don’t,” Martha said, looking amused. 

“I’m Sharon,” Sharon said. “Really, why are you here though?"

“Disturbance in the temporal-historical flow,” the Doctor said. “This here is a time machine, my Tardis, and it skipped out of the string it was following. Hawking was dead on in some respects, even if he didn’t quite get all of it right, nope, he didn’t—“ he trailed off and spun in the room. “You’ve made something to fix it, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Sharon said. “It’s at the London Eye—“

“Of course it is, of course it is, perfect shape. Well then—“ he gestured at the police box. No: the Tardis. Whatever that meant.

“I don’t think we’ll all fit in there,” Matthew said.

“It’s bigger on the inside,” Martha said, with the air of someone who’s said it before.

“So are we,” Matthew said, which wasn’t strictly true, Sharon thought, but he did contain multitudes, or however it worked.

The Doctor smirked. “They’ll all fit,” he said. And so they did.

Fixing the temporal-historical flow turned out to involve quite a bit of running, more climbing than Sharon had done ever, in her whole life, and also a fair amount of danger as Matthew had to let the angels out to play and sing, and they all had to wear some pretty wacky earbuds to keep the noise out.

“Being free is great,” Martha said, tilting her head. “But it doesn’t sound like that’s the way they mean it.”

“It’s more like being—absorbed. Into them. I think.” Sharon offered.

“Something like that,” the Doctor said, studying Matthew as he finished tying down the new pieces of metal they’d added to the Eye. 

“You shouldn’t have any more visitors, now,” he said, after it was done. 

“Feel free to come back,” Matthew said, not sounding like he meant it, really, which Sharon got. The Doctor was—definitely not of this world. She was very sure of that. And neither she nor Matthew had any reason to be fond of visitors with strange powers. She moved a little closer to Matthew who nudged her with his shoulder. He knew what she meant, then. 

“Thank you, I just might” the Doctor said.

“You’re welcome to come back too,” Sharon told Martha, who grinned. 

“If himself takes us this way I wouldn’t mind,” she said.

In another universe, Sharon thought, if she was very very lucky, Martha Jones was her best friend.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope the surprise!crossovers are alright :) I couldn’t stop thinking about it once I got the assignment.


End file.
